'For St Paul, established authority took ­precedence over even moral authority.' Photograph: PA

'I could imagine Jesus being born in the camp," mused Giles Fraser, the departing canon chancellor of St Paul's who so rebelliously made the church relevant this week. For my part, I could imagine St Paul siding with health and safety.

Forgive the lapse into theological technicalese, especially from a pagan such as myself, but the cathedral's namesake was a bit of an arse. For St Paul, established authority took precedence over even moral authority. The New Testament reverentially preserves a letter in which our hero writes that he is sending a runaway slave back to his master, specifically violating an Old Testament command. "Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee," runs the relevant passage in Deuteronomy. "He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him."

So, after a week in which the instinctively malign bumblings of British authority yet again had the flavour of a debased Ealing comedy, Rev Fraser's principled departure brought a sense of clarity. Friday's summoning of the lawyers by St Paul's merely underscored it. We now know that Giles's erstwhile colleagues do not want those who perceive themselves the slaves of capitalism dwelling where it liketh them in the church's gate. They would liketh the protesters to "move on", in fact – even though it seems likely to lead to ugly scenes and possibly violence – and allow them to resume the softly-softly behind-the-scenes work in fighting injustice and selling £180 cufflinks which has done such a bang-up job of making the victims of their City neighbours feel empowered.

At some level you have to admire the church's absolute insistence on ineffectuality. Speaking of which, what a nostalgic pleasure it was to see the former archbishop of Canterbury George Carey wheel himself on to the Telegraph comment pages to dispense a column that would be absurdly flattered by the description of useful idiocy. "How could Occupy be unaware?" wondered His Pointmissingness, of all the work the church was doing to promote justice. "The St Paul's Institute alone has been raising precisely the issues Occupy is raising."

How on earth did they miss that? It feels the moment to reprise the old rumour of how George Carey landed the big job. Legend has it that the Anglican establishment's wildly preferred candidate was John Habgood, the hugely intelligent Archbishop of York. Fearing Habgood was too much of a lefty for Margaret Thatcher to anoint, the bishops hatched a plot: the only alternative they would submit would be a candidate of such transparent uselessness that she could only give the job to Habgood. I need hardly tell you how that one turned out.

Needless to say, Lord Carey bought the police line about their thermal imaging cameras having revealed the tents to have been mostly empty. I was always less convinced, given that the Telegraph's thermal imaging video showed a man walking behind a tent only for the red glow of his leg to promptly disappear. Perhaps it was coated in some fiendishly clever anti-thermal formula. But this week's apparent debunking of the footage – protesters hired their own thermal camera and found full tents showed up empty – suggests the contraption was set to a heat sensitivity that would not even have detected the presence in a tent of a McDonald's apple pie (widely held to be the hottest thing in the universe, bar the centre of the sun).

Still, we must once again salute the Metropolitan police, who have brought out the CTU-style hardware to investigate the contents of a few tents, but never even bothered to open the sacks of evidence of the News of the World's industrial phone hacking that sat gathering dust in their own offices. The force's first priority is to provide self-regarding footage for Police Camera Action, so let's hope this means the Christmas bloopers special is now a wrap.

The church, meanwhile, has missed a sensational trick. Namely, the chance to hold out against the opaque Corporation of London and allow a space where an alternative view of the world could be presented. Call it Passport to St Paul's, inspired by the classic Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico, in which the south London district secedes from British jurisdiction, sparking a few heady summer days of rationing-free existence and other unconventional capers. A way is found to finesse them back into the fold, of course – but everyone has learned something, and the operative word is "finesse". Not "order".

Instead, we have closing ranks and the likes of Carey, who noted stuffily that Giles Fraser resigned "via the predictable medium of Twitter". "My paramount concern throughout," Carey revealed, "has been that the reputation of Christianity is being damaged by the episode." But of course it has. And you know, we might deem this blinkered obsession with "the brand" far more distastefully modern than Fraser's use of social media – were it not a self-interested survival strategy almost as old as the church itself.

• This story was amended on 4 November 2011 to remove an incorrect reference to the protesters having hired the same camera as that used by the Telegraph.